MCH listed on HoSE: Waiting for a new "national stock"

After several years of silence, the Vietnamese stock market is witnessing a revival not only due to increased liquidity and market scores, but also due to the wave of IPOs and stock listings of many large enterprises. One of the most anticipated names today is MCH stock of Masan Consumer Corporation.

Speaking at the Masan Group's Community Day event, Mr. Michael Hung Nguyen, Deputy General Director of Masan Group Corporation (Masan Group, HoSE: MSN), said that Masan Consumer's plan to change floors was approved by the group and shareholders at the beginning of the year and is being actively promoted. The group expects MCH to be eligible to join the VN30 basket.

The MCH transfer deal is worth waiting for because for quite a long time, the HoSE listed floor has lacked new names with enough weight in the field of essential consumer goods. Icons once known as “national stocks” such as VNM or SAB have long since become old because their growth has been saturated, and their stock prices have also been submerged in a “downtrend”.

Vietnamese Nam Ngu displayed on shelves alongside domestic products at Costco Korea

Sketch of the “candidate”

Masan Consumer was established in 1996, is a subsidiary of Masan and is a leading enterprise in the field of fast-moving consumer goods in Vietnam. The name Masan Consumer is associated with many familiar billion-dollar brands such as CHIN-SU, Omachi, Nam Ngu, Kokomi, Wake Up 247 and other spice, convenience food and beverage industries.

Each major brand brings in hundreds of millions of USD in revenue each year for Masan Consumer and has in fact created a revolution in the consumer goods industry in Vietnam. The company's products are present in 98% of Vietnamese households, leading the market share of fish sauce (68.8%), chili sauce (67%), soy sauce (52.9%). The distribution network is widespread throughout Vietnam with more than 313,000 traditional points of sale (GT) and 8,500 modern points of sale (MT).

The international standard factory system also allows Masan Consumer to be proactive in product research and production as well as quality control in the context of consumers' increasingly high demands on quality and rapidly changing consumer tastes.

In addition, being in the same ecosystem with the modern retail chains WinMart and WinMart+ is not simply about having more distribution channels, but more importantly, the customer data of this retail chain will be an extremely useful input for Masan Consumer to analyze and adjust formulas, designs, pricing strategies and even product tastes to keep up with the changes of modern Vietnamese people; experimental products are also closer to consumer needs, thereby shortening the innovation time.

In general, it is rare for a business, especially a Vietnamese business, to achieve the level of value chain perfection like Masan Consumer.

Customers taste Chinsu chili sauce with American dishes

Another difference of Masan Consumer is the development strategy of this enterprise. Unlike many large enterprises that often expand their product portfolio horizontally, Masan Consumer chooses a strategy that this enterprise calls "Fewer - Bigger - Faster", which means focusing on fewer products but providing larger quantities with faster deployment speed. The reason Masan Consumer pursues this "Less but better" spirit is because according to statistics, about 20% of the leading brands (SKUs) of this enterprise are contributing up to 80% of total revenue, so it is necessary to focus on high-performance products and eliminate ineffective SKUs.

This “lean” strategy not only creates rapid growth momentum for Masan Consumer but also helps maintain high profitability through every economic cycle. Statistics show that from 2017 to 2024, Masan Consumer’s after-tax profit has continuously increased over the years, from VND 2,245 billion to VND 7,920 billion.

New national stock?

Returning to the story of stocks on the HoSE, among the economic sectors, the consumer staples sector is a rather special sector, called by investors as a highly defensive sector, meaning it is less susceptible to fluctuations from the stock market in particular and the economy in general compared to other sectors. This is a unique attraction that makes the stocks of this sector often accepted by investors at a higher valuation than other sectors.

On that basis, the stocks of any essential consumer goods enterprise that maintains good growth over the years, with a clear competitive advantage, will be sought after by investors because they satisfy the dual criteria: being both a defensive stock and a growth stock. Vinamilk 's VNM once became a "national stock" because it satisfied this dual criterion. Everyone wants to own a stock that both pays regular dividends at a high rate and grows rapidly over the years.

MCH is meeting these dual criteria, only lacking the "east wind" to list its shares on the HoSE and enter the VN30 basket. In fact, not only has it maintained its long-term profit growth momentum, but Masan Consumer is also one of the enterprises paying the most generous dividends to shareholders. For many consecutive years, this enterprise has paid cash dividends of about VND 4,500/share when MCH's price was only a few tens of thousands of VND/share. Notably, in 2023 and 2024, MCH's total cash dividend payment will be up to VND 36,300/share. For many long-term investors, the dividend payment in 2023 - 2024 alone will almost recover the investment capital, not to mention the benefits from the increase in stock price.

It can be seen that Masan Consumer's MCH stock is on the "path" to becoming a new representative of the essential consumer goods industry on the HoSE floor and further becoming a new "national stock".

Source: https://baodautu.vn/mch-len-san-hose-cho-doi-mot-co-phieu-quoc-dan-moi-d432105.html